The Book of Fathers

A Few Notes on Hungarian History

One well-known fact is that Hungary and the Hungarians have lost every important war and revolution since the time of the Renaissance king Matthias Corvinus. He occupied Vienna and became Prince of Austria. He died in 1490. Since then, the nation and its heroes can be found only on the losing side.

A famous, if hoary, joke is instructive.

A Hungarian enters a small shop in New York and wants to buy a hat. But he doesn’t have enough dollars on him, so he asks whether he could pay in forints, the Hungarian currency.

“I’ve never seen any forints,” the owner of the shop says. “Show me some.”

So the Hungarian shows him a ten-forint note.

“Who’s this guy here?” asks the owner.

“This is Sándor Petöfi, the brightest star of Hungarian poetry. He lived in the nineteenth century. He was one of the March Youth who launched the 1848-49 War of Independence. He was killed in a battle at Segesvár when the war was crushed by the Austrians and the Russians.”

“Oh my God, what an awful story… And who is this guy on the twenty-forint bill?”

“This is György Dózsa, who led a peasant uprising in the sixteenth century. It was crushed and he was executed-actually, he was burned on a throne of fire-”

“OK, OK. And who is that, on the fifty?”

“That’s Ferenc Rákóczi II, leader of another war of independence, crushed by the Habsburgs. He was forced to spend his life in exile in Turkey.”

“I should have guessed. And on the one hundred?”

“That’s Lajos Kossuth, leader of the 1848-49 War of Independence, you know. After it was crushed, he had to flee-”

The owner stops him again. “OK, you poor man, just go-you can have the hat for free.”

(Note: these banknotes are no longer in circulation, owing to the ravages of inflation.)

Towards the end of the seventeenth century, the Wesselényi-Zrínyi conspiracy to overthrow the Habsburgs was quickly and bloodily put down. Some of the participants, like the grandfather and his family in the first chapter, were able to flee abroad. Only the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699 ended this chaotic period, finally sweeping the Turks out of Hungary and Transylvania (in fact, the Turks controlled more of present-day Hungary than the Habsburgs) after a period of occupation that it had seemed would never end, and in fact lasted one hundred and fifty years. The period of Austrian rule that followed was even longer. Hungary was more or less a colony until the First World War.

But the revolts and plots against the rulers continued. The so-called Kuruc (“vagabond”) guerrillas proved a major irritant to the Habsburgs. The Kuruc were led initially by Thököly and later by Ferenc Rákóczi II, who was very nearly successful. When the rebellion failed, as we saw above, he and some of his commanders took refuge in Turkey, and the country endured the Habsburgs’ bloody revenge. For centuries, the term Kuruc referred to anyone opposed to the Habsburgs, or any tyrant. Supporters of the Austrians were called Labanc (“tousled”), a term used for collaborators and reactionaries. Both nouns are found in Hungarian poetry.

The movement for the linguistic renewal has already been mentioned. It also had an anti-Habsburg angle, because people who spoke Hungarian, rather than German, were thereby rejecting the official language of the monarchy. The outstanding anti-Habsburg event of this period was undoubtedly the 1848 Revolution and the War of Independence. For the best part of two years, the nation genuinely believed that it could oust the Austrians and gain its long-deserved independence. The rebels under Lajos Kossuth and an independent army almost succeeded-only the assistance of the Russian Tsar and his Cossacks finally tipped the scales in favor of the Austrians. The retaliation was even more brutal than usual. A number of martyrs were created in a few months: you will find their names on street signs in Budapest and other Hungarian cities.

A period of the bleakest silence and suffering ensued. A new era of conciliation began only in 1867, thanks to Ferenc Deák, a middle-of-the-road politician (who has a walk-on part in the novel). He was the leading figure among those who thought that while the past should not be forgotten, the future lay in a settlement with the Austrians. The pact was called the Ausgleich (“Settlement”), and the Dual (Austro-Hungarian) Monarchy was born. It was known locally as “K. u. K.,” abbreviating “Kaiserlich und Königlich” (“Imperial and Royal”), because the Habsburg on the throne became both Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary. Though there were common ministries, the most important offices remained in Austrian hands.

In 1896, the Hungarian nation celebrated a thousand years of existence with much fanfare. Some historians claimed that the actual year of the country’s founding was 895, but that the authorities had needed more time to organize the pomp and circumstance. If this is true, it is another typically Hungarian tale.

For Jews living in Hungary, life had never been easy. Down the centuries they were not allowed to own anything, including land. The situation varied somewhat according to region and city, but their equal rights were first enshrined only at the end of the 1848 Revolution and War of Independence, in which a great number of Jews participated. (Most of them wanted to be Hungarians and behaved accordingly.)

After the First World War the Paris Peace Treaties were unkind to Hungary. The country lost approximately two-thirds of its territory and about half of its population. In the new, smaller Hungary, the proportion of Jews, especially in the professions, now appeared very high. This fostered a crude anti-Semitism. For example, a regulation, numerus clausus, restricted the proportion of Jews allowed to attend university to their proportion in the population as a whole. My father was able to obtain his law degree in spite of this rule, but he was unable to work as a lawyer when more restrictive anti-Jewish laws came into force in the 1940s.

Having been on the losing side in the First World War, Hungary wanted to be among the winners after the next one. They curried favor with Germany and Hitler, who seemed willing to help with the restitution of the lost territories-another example of the farsightedness of the Hungarians… By 1945, Hungary had lost two armies and almost a tenth of its citizens, including roughly half of its Jewish population.

Socialism was no easy ride either. The new rulers of the country eliminated each other in accordance with the Soviet dictum that it is essential to try your best comrades on trumped-up charges and execute them. And if a dictator lives long enough, he can rebury and rehabilitate those who have been killed. This is what happened to László Rajk. He was reburied in 1956, just before the Revolution that almost shook the Soviet empire. Soviet tanks crushed it in a matter of days. More martyrs were created. The prime minister of the revolutionary government, Imre Nagy, was among those hanged.

He, and others, were reburied with full honors in 1989, the year socialism collapsed. János Kádár, who had reigned since 1956 and was considered the murderer of Imre Nagy and many other freedom fighters, was ousted. I had never dared hope I would live to see the end of socialism. I happened to be in the U.S. in 1989 and when I read in the New York Times what was going on in Hungary, I could hardly believe my eyes. I thought Western journalists were exaggerating events and I was constantly waiting for the bad news: that the Russians were invading Hungary again, as they always did. Thus the humble author is shown to be useless at foreseeing the future, unlike many of the characters in this novel. Literature has its uses, even if it is Hungarian.

Miklós Vámos

December 2005